When my sister was just beginning as a playwright, she needed a teenaged, black actress for her play. Boston, where we lived at the time, does not have a huge network of teenaged, black actresses so she reluctantly asked me to play the part and I agreed.

At the time, I was in a years-long retreat from the spoken word. I spoke at home, but the number of times I spoke in public each week I could probably count on my hand. The only way I can describe it is that it felt as though, around age twelve or so, I had swallowed a smooth, white river stone and now it sat, lodged at the base of my throat, blocking any words from getting out. I had perfected the art of absenting my consciousness from a room while my body remained—ultimately, a useless and self-sabotaging skill. I weighed 250 lbs and was the only black girl in my grade at school, but teachers would frequently say to me "I forgot you were here," or "I didn't even see you" at the end of a class. I slowed my breathing to the shallowest breath and settled back into my bones, barely moving. When I did move, I mapped my school according to best hiding places—the faculty bathrooms that locked from the inside; the forgotten nurse's station on the fourth floor with its cool white cot and large sunny window; the small closet that was supposed to be used for watching videos for film class but was better suited as a place to hibernate.

Like most adolescents, I desperately wanted to be seen and I desperately wished to be invisible.

Like most adolescents, I desperately wanted to be seen and I desperately wished to be invisible. I played a million different roles in my head every day, all variations of the girl I wished to be. I made up an alter ego who looked exactly like me but was 125 lbs lighter and training to be an Olympic diver. Her name was Katie Greenwald. Sometimes I just imagined myself, but braver: the kind of person who had the courage to smile back at the clerk at the thrift store who complimented my purse or had the will to figure out how to make money from writing. I never wrote down these alternate realities—I was deeply ashamed of them. I understood this longing not as the messy pangs of the artistic impulse, but as something baby-ish—maybe a few developmental steps ahead of having an imaginary friend. I existed in a continual tide of longing—it really did feel like that, like the rush and rise of an ocean. It is a feeling from which most creative acts originate, but I didn't realize it then. The longing made me feel embarrassed and ashamed and worst of all, very, very young. So I tried to ignore it.

But my sister, I think, had figured it out. She had never been embarrassed of the desire to be a writer: she had stated it for as long as I knew her, and she took it as a given that that would be her life. She was older than me, of course, so she had a head start. But she had felt her own secret longing, whatever it was, and she had made this play. And now, in a moment of desperation, she asked me to act in it.

She said, "The play isn't about our family." The play was about a mother and a daughter and their tumultuous relationship. They are always bickering, and at the start of the play, the mother is in the process of a divorce. The whole play takes place in the mother's car, presenting their conversations in the front seat while the mother drives her daughter to different places. When my sister wrote that play, even though she had graduated from college and my other sister and I were well into high school, all three of us still spent nearly every Saturday morning in the car with our mother. My sister didn't own a car, so we would drive around together, running errands, ferrying back and forth to classes and always talking, talking, talking, talking. "This play is not about us," my sister insisted.

I played the part of the daughter. I said to the actress who played my mother tens of lines, small and prosaic and big and poetic, that sounded like things I had said to my own mother, that echoed my own voice when I was able to use it at home. "The character isn't you, though," my sister insisted. I stood on the stage and I said those lines that sounded like my voice and when I got off the stage, I couldn't say two words to the other actress or the director. They very kindly pretended not to notice that I could not look either one of them in the eye.

At the time, I was so dissociated from the world around me that I didn't think this was strange. Or, a part of me recognized it as strange on an intellectual level, and filed it away for later use, for a time when I was able to feel more.

A woman who was friends with my sister came to the play and asked me to audition for a role in another production. I said yes. I was excited. It is the culmination of every self-centered teenager's dream: someone had somehow seen past my shyness and discerned my latent greatness. I auditioned for the role. I was probably the youngest person to try out—I had recently turned sixteen and was still in high school. Everyone else was an adult. I got the part.

It is the culmination of every self-centered teenager's dream: someone had somehow seen past my shyness and discerned my latent greatness.

My pride in this fact was short-lived. It became clear that the reason I was given the part was because most of the black actors in Boston were refusing to participate in the production. I was told, in whispered tones, that there was an unofficial boycott of the whole thing. The play was a spoof of '70s Blaxploitation films and horror B movies. But even at the time—the nostalgia-obsessed, Tarantino-drenched late-'90s—the play read to me as less of a noxious caricature or a potent piece of hip satire and more as something a little grubbier, a little fuzzier.

I took the part anyways. I should say here, the part was "teenaged-drug addicted prostitute." I also played, briefly, in the first act, a stewardess. So, maybe those boycotting actors were on to something. But I was so enamored with the idea of being able to speak, but not having to play a version of myself, that I was excited.

I could not speak to anyone in the production. Everyone was at least ten years older than me, and the play had many scenes that tried very hard to be sexy. It was an exercise in first- and second-hand embarrassment. I had never even shaken hands with a boy my own age, and I had to approach the lead actor, offer to have sex with him for twenty dollars, pull him in for a kiss, and then get bitten on the neck and turn into a zombie. It was so painful to do this role that I don't remember much about the rehearsal process—only the smell of the stage smoke that was pumped out to wreath the stage at the start of my scene.

I had never even shaken hands with a boy my own age, and I had to approach the lead actor, offer to have sex with him for twenty dollars, pull him in for a kiss, and then get bitten on the neck and turn into a zombie.

I do remember two things. I remember having to warm-up with the other actors and how stiff I was. They all knew I was stiff, they all knew I was self-conscious and a terrible actor, and the fact that they knew this and went out of their way to be kind to me made it all so much worse. At one point, three of the actors took me aside and tried to lead me through breathing exercises to loosen me up. I could only take short, shallow breaths at first—that's how nervous and anxious I was. They told me to close my eyes. They talked me into taking deeper breaths. I listened, I did, and I felt my chest open up like they were describing, I felt the stone in my throat jostle and then I opened my eyes and caught one of the male actors staring at my breasts as I breathed in and out.

The other thing I remember was having to practice that big scene as the prostitute. "Scream louder," the director kept saying, "Scream bigger, if you can." Finally, I did it. I screamed and screamed as I hobbled off the stage in the costume heels I was never able to walk in. I screamed and whimpered all the way to my exit, stage-left, where I turned into a monster in the wings. It got laughs every time. "It sounds so good," the other actors said, kindly, when it was all over.

At the time, the whole experience—scabbing for other black actors and playing a teen prostitute and getting my boobs ogled and screaming my head off every night in the theater—was something I was both inordinately proud of and also embarrassed by. I realize now, though, that it was practice for what it could mean to be seen and heard.

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